THE LIST

REVOLTING YOUTH: The Apprentice Boys of Derry shut the city gates against Catholic troops in 1688; pupils at Dotheboys Hall rose up against evil headmaster Wackford Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby; Richmal Crompton's William and his Outlaws declared war on all adults; in Lindsay Anderson's If, sixth-formers machine-gun staff and parents on speech day; three years ago girls from the Royal School in Bath boycotted lessons in support of a colleague suspended for staying out all night; bonded slave children marched through India in 1993 forcing the Indian government to enforce laws on child labour; Iqbal Masih of Pakistan, murdered two months ago, travelled to the UN on behalf of the children who knot carpets; pupils at Rugby School, protesting at the imposition of a head girl, boycotted a chapel service in honour of their founder, Thomas Arnold.

TODAY is the feast day of Saint Ephraem, fourth-century scholar from Mesopotamia. He was largely responsible for the introduction of singing into church services. Ephraem was said to be small, beardless and bald with a shrivelled skin. He wept a lot and never laughed. Counterbalancing this tragic image is a story hagiography records as illustrating his great wit. One day a woman washing clothes stared at him as he passed and he asked her to look away. "It is quite right for me to look at you, a man, for from you I was taken," she said, to which he replied: "If the women of this city are so wise, how exceedingly wise its men must be."

18 June 1835: William Cobbett (above), writer, political activist and originator of parliamentary reporting, died. The son of an innkeeper, he had no formal education but wrote simply and trenchantly on the social issues of the day. His first confrontation with authority came when he brought charges of corruption against army officers for their conduct in America. "It is the system, the vermin-breeding system, that I for my part am at war with," he wrote. In 1810, an attack on the government landed him in Newgate jail for two years. On his release he fled to America and for a while led a quiet life, returning in 1819 with the disinterred remains of Tom Paine. Only in 1832, aged 69, did he achieve his ambition to become an elected Member of Parliament.